The Best Years of Our Lives

Every generation has its war veterans. The author and the guys he served

A couple months before this story starts, I went back home and met up with a few of my civilian friends for some beers at a bar we used to all hang out at. It was good to see them all again, since I hadn't seen them in years and had no idea what any of them have been up to, and my one friend then told me, "I just want to let you know that I don't support the war, and I think the whole thing is just bullshit, but I'm glad you made it back."

So I thanked him, not really sure if that was a compliment or not, and he then went on to say that he thinks all this "Support the troops" stuff is just a bunch of flag-waving bullshit and that there needs to be more pressure on the troops to end this war. Confused, I asked him what he meant by that, and he told me that the reason why the Vietnam War ended is that people protested the troops as well as the war, and we need to do the same thing now, because the troops are just as responsible as the politicians, and they don't have to fight if they don't want to. I told him it's not as easy as that, then I jokingly asked him, "Well, what do you mean, do you think we should be spitting on the troops when they get back or what?"

He thought about that one for a second, said, "Well..." and looked up at me with his nodding head, and said, "Yeah."

I finished my beer, told them that it was good to see all of them again, but I had to leave, and so I did. And I realized that whatever friends I had before the Army no longer really exist. The only friends that I have now are the ones I made while I was in.

Haji don't surf, and I didn't think Callahan did either until I visited him down in San Diego, where he was living with Vance. Callahan's decision to move to southern California was actually made up in a guard tower back in Mosul, Iraq, where we'd been stationed together, bringing righteousness to that land.

On the drive down from Los Angeles, I noticed that a couple cars I was sharing I-5 with were decorated with fashionable magnetic yellow Support Our Troops ribbons. Due to gas prices, I don't often drive, but you just don't see too many of those in Los Angeles, so I kinda took notice. Not really at the ribbons themselves but at the people who chose to sport them. Every time I'd see one I'd curiously speed up so that I could look over and catch a glimpse of the person behind the wheel. For some reason I find myself fascinated by these Yellow Ribbon People and their show of support. What exactly are they trying to say? Thank you for having a low-paying job so that there's no draft and I don't have to go? In fairness, I assume that some of these people have husbands, wives, sons, or daughters in the military. And I assume there are plenty of veterans out there whose hearts are warmed with patriotism whenever they see a yellow ribbon. I'm just not one of them.

Anyway, when I finally got down to San Diego, I parked my ribbonless vehicle outside Vance's mom's house. The last time I saw Vance and Callahan, we were at a bar in Olympia, Washington, not far from Fort Lewis, where we were stationed. It was the night before my last day in the Army. I remember that night as being somewhat depressing. Horrocks, Cannon, Vance, Callahan, and a couple other close friends of mine from the platoon were all there, and I knew that it could be the last time I ever saw them. I wondered about that for a while. Some of them still had years left on their military contracts, some reenlisted, and some got out. I was one that got out. A few months later, Vance and Callahan both transitioned out of the Army as well.

In Mosul, they were in the same line squad, and they'd also been stationed in Germany together; because of this, they would always pair up on force protection in the guard towers. They'd spend countless hours chain-smoking Haji cigarettes, staring off into the Mosul skyline, talking about their plans once deployment ended and they were out. Vance was looking forward to going back home to sunny San Diego, and he'd tell Callahan, who had never been to California before, all about it — the beaches, the surf, the food, the bars, the women, the laid-back California attitude, etc. Callahan wasn't really sure what he wanted to do once he got out, so Vance suggested that he come visit San Diego and stay at his mom's place for a bit. If he liked it there, they would find an apartment together. Vance's mom started mailing them the classified section of a local newspaper and while on guard they would skim the apartment section. Vance would explain why the rent was cheaper in some places than others, and they would debate how close they needed to be to the beach.

I was a little nervous when I rang Vance's doorbell, but as soon as he opened that door and welcomed me in, it was just like the old times when I'd walk up to the third floor of the barracks and bang on his door to see if he wanted to hang out.

Vance was in high spirits. He had just gotten a job as a personal trainer at a local fitness club, which was all right for now. Even while in Mosul, Vance had a weight bench and dumbbells right outside his door where he would work out every day. One of the reasons he did a lot of heavy training over there was because he wanted to get back into competitive Muay Thai kick-boxing, a passion of his, once he got back.

Callahan was surfing and living off the money he had saved in Iraq, as well as unemployment checks. California isn't exactly the cheapest place to live, and he mentioned something about having a difficult time trying to land an entry-level job, but he was confident all the same. He was sure that being a vet would somehow help him land a job, and he told me all about how he went down to the VA and asked them if there were any entry-level jobs available for him that he could apply for, and the irritated lady behind the counter sternly told him, "We don't call them entry-level jobs here!" as she pointed at the bulletin board located right behind him displaying all available jobs. These were the kind of jobs that had "no college or experience necessary" listed under the qualifications. Most were file-clerk-type jobs, and he applied for all of them. One by one, he received letters in the mail briefly explaining that he was "not qualified."

At first he seemed like the same old Specialist Callahan that I knew back in the Army, but then he started showing me his surfboards and explaining to me in minute detail the social, spiritual, and technical differences between long boards and short boards, and I realized that maybe he had changed a little. I grew up in California, but nowhere near a surfable beach, and all this enthusiastic talk about swells, peaks, and tides was all completely foreign to me. Callahan now had a one-track mind, it was all about the beach and the waves, and being one with the ocean. "If I never had to worry about money or family or life, I would move to the ocean," Callahan told me. "I would live off the ocean, and some occasional Mexican food. I would spend every waking moment possible in the water, and I would be happy. Not the happy that Christmas morning brings, but a true and permanent happiness." I was stoked for him. He looked to be at peace, the most satisfied I had ever seen him. I was psyched that maybe the war hadn't changed him.

That night, we drank beers and exchanged war stories while watching one of Callahan's many surfing DVDs, The Endless Summer.

The next day I drove back to L. A. glad that Vance and Callahan were doing well. We all kept in close touch through our MySpace profiles, e-mails, phone calls, and every now and then we'd drunk-dial each other and say a bunch of things that only we could say to each other. Things like "Nobody here knows, man" or "Nobody here cares."

Callahan finally found himself a job. He went down to a job-placement agency and told the lady working there that he was a returning veteran and in need of a job, any job, he didn't care, he just wanted to work. She asked him if he had a résumé, and he said no, not really, all he had done prior to that was fill out job applications. So she told him, You're not going to leave this room today until you have a résumé saved on a disk, and she was going to help him write the thing. She asked him a bunch of questions, and when he looked at the final copy, he noticed that she downplayed all his combat experience. She explained that it would be easier for him to find a job that way. Specialist Callahan was a SAW gunner in my platoon, and once, in the middle of an ambush, under heavy enemy fire, he single-handedly put out a fire that was started when multiple RPGs hit his vehicle, taking out the engine in a huge fireball. There were nine men in that vehicle. I guess employers don't want to know that kind of stuff.

With résumé now saved on disk, he sent it out to people who were looking to hire on Craigslist's help-wanted ads. He responded to three or four ads each day, finally landing a ten-dollar-an-hour packing job down at some shipping place packing fifty-pound boxes, putting labels on them, and moving them from one spot to another, five hundred boxes a day.

A couple months later, Callahan called me up to invite me to his going-away party.

"What do you mean a going-away party?" I said. "Are you fucking crazy? You can't move! Half the reason why I moved back to L. A. was because you and Vance live in San Diego! I thought you fuckin' loved it down there!"

"I do, man, but I can't find a real job. I've tried, but nobody will hire me, and I can't afford it here. I have family in Michigan. I can live with them."

"Ain't no waves in the Great Lakes, man!"

"There's waves out there."

"Not like the ones down here."

"I know, man, I know."

It had been a couple months since I'd seen Callahan, and when I pulled up in front of the apartment he'd taken, this guy in flip-flops, shaggy hair, surf shorts, sunglasses, hooded sweatshirt, and a tan rolled up to the parking lot on a hippie-cruiser skateboard and said, "What's up, bro?"

Every apartment had a waxed surfboard leaning against the wall, people were blasting Sublime from their rooms, and everybody looked unemployed, but without a care in the world as long as the surf's up.

We walked down to a nearby locals' surf bar, where we met up with Vance, who was tired. He looked like he'd been down in the coal mines all day. Being a personal trainer for desperate housewives who thought they were ten pounds overweight was taking a heavy toll on him. His fatigue was compounded by the fact that he was also training for an upcoming kick-boxing fight; he was thirty pounds lighter and had the look in his eyes of a focused killer. He told me that kick-boxing for him was a positive way to let it all out and deal with some of the things that he had to deal with. God help whoever gets in the ring with him now.

In Iraq, Vance had been a team leader who led countless house raids and missions, and he'd been a real calming presence during some tough times. But once he got back from Iraq, his mother and girlfriend started noticing a difference in him. His sleep was erratic, and he was having nightmares, so they suggested that he go down to the VA hospital. He told me all about how he had gone and spoken with a psychiatrist, who made him fill in the bubbles on a questionnaire, questions along the lines of:

Do you get anxious in a crowd? Check.

Do you avoid certain situations because you'll react a certain way? Check.

Do you react more than need be in certain situations? Check.

Do you have a difficult time sleeping? Check.

Do you feel like your life is in danger on a normal day? Normal day?

He told me that you have to score above a 50 to come up hot for post-traumatic stress disorder. Vance himself scored around a B-minus. He suggested that I go down to the VA, and that I didn't have to lie or anything, just tell them the truth and answer all the questions honestly and that I'd come up positive for PTSD, too.

"Ever go down to the VA in L. A.?" he asked me.

"Naw."

"I go to counseling once a week," he said.

"Is it anything like Fight Club?"

Vance told me no, that his therapy was one-on-one, in what is called "trauma processing." He said that it was hard at first. The therapist brings up a traumatic incident that you had over there, and you talk about it, but in the present tense, and you describe what you see, feel, and smell, and then he makes you talk about it again and again, and each time you talk about it you go into a little bit more detail, and then he brings you down, and you relax. Vance suggested that I look into it.

"Maybe," I said, though I knew I wouldn't.

He said he was looking into maybe becoming a police officer, and that he had bought a bunch of books to help him study for the exams. Then he quietly mentioned that he had also filled out an application for Blackwater Security. I nearly spit my gin and tonic. "You did what?" (Note to reader: Blackwater Security are those psychopath private security contractors who volunteer to go to Iraq and sometimes end up hanging dead by a noose from a bridge.)

"Do you have a death wish?" I asked Vance, and he downplayed the whole thing, saying that they probably wouldn't take him, because he doesn't have any Special Forces experience, but that he filled out an application just the same.

The guy who wrote Farewell to Arms once said, "Certainly there is no hunting like the hunting of man and those who have hunted armed men long enough and liked it, never really care for anything else thereafter." I wondered if that was what was happening to Vance right now.

He had to wake up bright and early the next morning for work, and he couldn't drink too much because he was training for his fight, so we made plans to hang out again in the future, and I went with Callahan back to his place. Out front, his pickup truck, which he bought with the money that he saved up while in Iraq, was packed with his belongings.

Callahan had some medical marijuana that a friend of his scored at some cannabis club, and he asked what would be the best way to stash it in his car if he was driving cross-country. I told him that he didn't want to do that, and his best bet would be to smoke it up now so he wouldn't get busted having it on him in case he got pulled over, and of course I would help him out with that task. So we smoked it, and I passed out on his sofa. The next morning I woke up, said goodbye, and wished him luck.

The last time I talked to Callahan he was living in some part of greater Detroit, over by Nine Mile Road, and seemed pretty optimistic about prospects for a job as a security guard. I wonder how many security guards in the country are vets, because that would make four Operation Iraqi Freedom veterans that I know of who are now security guards. And that's not even including Cannon.

Nine times out of ten, if I get a phone call late at night, it's Cannon, who works the midnight-to-6:00-A.M. shift Monday through Friday as a nine-dollar-an-hour security guard in Seattle.

When he graduated from high school, Cannon got himself a full-time job in retail at the local shopping mall and enrolled full-time at a nearby community college. His father, who worked for Boeing, helped him out with rent money so that he could concentrate on school, until his father was laid off. Cannon started working more and more hours at the mall and taking fewer classes. He started paying off his bills with his credit cards, going deeper into debt, at one point living off nothing but peanut butter straight from the jar. (Cannon claims that peanut butter provides enough nutrients for the human body to live on.) His grades dropped dramatically, pushing him to eventually drop out of school entirely. Thus, at age twenty, when he hit a point in his life where he was at less than zero, he joined the Army, kinda like I did at twenty-six.

Now he pulls the night shift guarding a parking lot. He makes sure that nobody breaks into any cars, and he proudly told me that only one car had been broken into during one of his shifts. He says you can usually tell by a person's body language whether they're up to no good. Also, car thieves like to wear hooded sweatshirts.

Cannon calls me up every two weeks or so to see how I'm doing and to find out if I'm ever going to be in the Seattle area again. "I might be heading up there soon," I told him one night. "Sergeant Horrocks sent me an invitation to his wedding in Montana."

"Horrocks is getting married? No way!"

I arrived at the Seattle/Tacoma airport and drove past Fort Lewis, down to Olympia. It seemed like every other car here in the King County and Puget Sound area had at least one or two yellow ribbons on it. Wow. Olympia is about a thirty-minute drive from Fort Lewis, and on Friday and Saturday nights we used to all pack into Sergeant Vance's Xterra (two in the front, three to four guys in the back, and sometimes one in the trunk) and go from bar to bar and try to drink Olympia dry.

I walked into that same bar we had gone to my last night, and the only thing I noticed that was different about it now was that the ashtrays were gone. After I drank a couple beers solo, Horrocks showed up. He looked exactly the same, a warm smile framed by a high and tight. We greeted each other, and the first thing I noticed about him was the mini combat-infantry lapel pin on his jacket collar, which of course he proudly pointed out to me. We sat at a table and ordered a couple drinks.

Horrocks and I had been roommates at Forward Operating Base Marez in Mosul for almost a year. We shared a room the size of a garage, and it was like Jack Lemmon and Walter Matthau, but somehow we became very good friends. We started catching up, and he told me all about how he had been sent over to RECON as an assistant team leader. RECON is where they send all the guys who are all "high speed" and "squared away." This didn't surprise me at all, as Horrocks was one of the best soldiers that I knew, and sincerely loves his occupation. He'll be going back to Iraq soon. I asked him how he felt about going back in RECON rather than in a regular infantry line squad, since RECON is a more dangerous job — sneak and peek in small teams. With a smile the old Horrocks that I knew back in Mosul came to life, and he said that he's more than happy to throw a few rounds downrange if need be, and the good news was that since I left they jacked up the maximum life insurance from $250,000 to more than $400,000. If they had done that before I got out, I just might have reenlisted.

Like me, Horrocks rarely ever goes out to bars. Maybe once in a blue moon he'll go out for a drink, but he always ends up leaving early, because it's just not the same anymore.

I spent the first Christmas I was back from Iraq with my parents. There's a gym over by where they live that I go to whenever I visit. It's the kind of gym where the front parking lot looks like a luxury-car lot, each car trying to outdo the next. I had one of those free one-week workout coupons, the kind they give you when you go in and pretend like you're interested in a membership. On this particular visit to the gym, I had finished working out in the weight room and decided to head over to the StairMasters to do some cardio. There was a television set tuned to one of the major news networks, and they were reporting about an attack that day in Mosul, which immediately got my attention. I stopped climbing to listen, and right at the part where they said something about casualties, a guy, late twenties, early thirties, a couple StairMasters to my right, interrupted what they were saying and asked, "Hey, man, are you watching this?"

At first I didn't know what to say to the guy. I wanted to say, "Yeah, I'm watching this, you low-carb-beer-drinking piece of shit," but of course I didn't have the balls to say that, so all I said instead was, "No."

He then asked, "Is it cool if I put on the game?"

"Uhh... yeah, sure, go ahead."

He then changed the channel over to the basketball game.

At some point, I stopped telling people that I was in the Army and that I had gone to Iraq. I found that if you start to tell people that you served in Operation Iraqi Freedom, they say:

"Thank you for serving!" followed by either a) some flag-waving bullshit, or b) equally bad, "I just want to let you know that I'm strongly against the war, but I support the troops!" (This always confuses the hell out of me.)

Sometimes, with a smile, they ask you if you killed anybody.

And then there are people who think they know everything about everything and want to talk to you about the politics of the war, right or wrong. And most of them base all their political opinions on shit they hear on the Jon Stewart show, and they want to talk to me about what it's like over there.

Then some people don't say anything at all when you tell them that you were over there — all they say back to you is "Oh," with their pursed lips.

So that's why I like to drink alone.

Horrocks agreed with me on that sad note, and after a couple drinks, we got in the rental and headed to his apartment. I had promised Cannon that at midnight I would stop by his work and hang out with him, but there was one last bar that Horrocks insisted we go to together one last time. He used to love going to this bar, so I made the detour. It was a workday, and when we got there, it was empty, the jukebox was silent and there was just an older AA-looking couple nursing stiff drinks in the corner. We walked up to the bar and Horrocks ordered us Bud Lights and Jäger shots, his trademark combination.

It finally hit me why Horrocks wanted to go to this bar so badly. It was the karaoke bar that he loved to get piss drunk and sing "Born to Be Wild" in. I've lost track of how many times I've seen him sing that song in this place. And Horrocks is the only person I know who can get a standing ovation every time; it was his song. He would be up onstage, mic in one hand, Bud Light in the other, singing his heart out. He didn't even have to look at the lyrics, he knew them all by heart. What was sad was that I didn't think I could ever picture him singing that song the same way again. Horrocks was no longer the hard-drinking wild man that I knew when I was in the Army. He was a lot more reserved.

While we were reminiscing, I caught myself paying particularly close attention to one of the empty tables over by the window.

The very last time I sat at that table was right before our deployment. I was with Specialist Blickenstaff, debating favorite metal bands over a couple beers. He was one of the first guys that I met when I arrived to the unit. His arms were covered in tattoos, and I recognized one of the tats he had — the logo of a band that I used to see play in small Bay Area clubs when I was younger. We'd always talk about music whenever we saw each other. It was at that table that I asked him if I could borrow some of his CDs so that I could burn them onto my iPod; the next day he loaned me a bunch. I forgot to return them before we deployed, and when we got to Kuwait, I apologized to him for that, and he told me not to worry about it, to just return them when we got back. I still have his CDs because Specialist Blickenstaff never made it back.

I suddenly felt guilty drinking in that bar after I realized that. No longer in the mood, we finished our beers and left.

The next morning I called Cannon to apologize. He asked me what happened, and I told him that on the way to finally dropping off Horrocks, we stopped by one last bar, located directly across the street from his apartment, and got filthy stinking drunk, until the bartender cut us off and kicked us out. We walked back to his place, I briefly met his soon-to-be-wife for the first time, which I'm sure made a great impression, and then I crashed out on his carpet.

I stopped by Cannon's apartment around 3:00 P.M. I banged on his door, nobody answered, so I pulled out the cell phone and called him. That woke him up, and he asked me where I was. I told him that I was at his front door. I heard tired footsteps, and, still half asleep, he let me in. We gave each other man hugs and I noticed that he was almost completely sleeved in tattoos now. He had an Iraqi flag that he had gotten in Mosul hanging on his wall alongside a couple punk posters, and he still had his red electric guitar on a stand in the corner. Out his balcony window, he had an amazing view of the community college where he had started taking classes again. Cannon was still trying to wake up from work the night before, so we both lit up a smoke. His security-guard uniform was draped across the sofa. We decided we'd drive to Fort Lewis and see how Lieutenant Armeni was doing.

When Cannon and I stepped into Lieutenant Armeni's office, he stood up from behind his steel desk, which was littered with various military forms and documents as well as a coffee cup with the Arrowhead Brigade shield on it. He greeted us with a warm smile and handshake. The last time I shook Lieutenant Armeni's hand was when our tour came to an end and we all boarded a civilian jet to fly home from Kuwait. We all cheered and smiled when we heard the wheels of the airplane finally kiss the concrete at McChord Air Force Base, and some hugged each other, and I remembered being hit with an excited feeling, and disbelief and relief that I made it, as well as an unexplainable sadness that it was all over. When we got off the plane and walked down the ramp, the very first person that I saw and shook hands with was Lieutenant Armeni. He was standing there to greet all of us and welcome us back. I was shocked to see him there. I thought he'd still be in a hospital bed or something with a bunch of tubes going in and out of him.

As I was talking to him now, I noticed that he had on his right wrist the same bracelet that Vance wears. I then looked over at Cannon and felt completely out of uniform when I saw that he wore the same bracelet, too. It's a black aluminum bracelet that I've seen a lot of veterans wear that has the engraved names and dates on it of soldiers who were KIA.

SSG BRIDGES SPC WESLEY SPC BLICKENSTAFF

KIA 8 DEC 2003, 1/23 IN, 3/2 SBCT STRYKER

OPERATION IRAQI FREEDOM

It's a miracle that Lieutenant Armeni is alive. One day a couple months before our deployment ended, back in Mosul, we were taking fire from all over and 3rd Squad was dismounted on the side of the street, completely exposed in the middle of the firefight, and Specialist Callahan was yelling desperately for some cover. So Lieutenant Armeni maneuvered his Stryker vehicle alongside them, and as soon as he did, an RPG aimed at 3rd Squad impacted his vehicle. The penetrator of the RPG came through his body armor at an oblique angle and it blew a hole in his armor, and a small piece of metal made it through the SAPI plate and Armeni's intestines spilled out.

"We're hit! This is Bravo Victor 65 Victor! We have wounded! We need CASEVAC. Time: now!" came over the radio.

Right after he got hit, smoke filled his Stryker and Lieutenant Armeni was yelling over and over, "I can't breathe! I can't breathe!"

Armeni told me that he remembers pulling his guts back in, and he remembers seeing them and smelling them when his stomach split open, but not much after that. "I remember not knowing I was hit initially and telling people to get back in their hatches, and I looked down and I was like, Holy shit, you know, my body armor was smoking...."

Sergeant Vance is convinced that if Lieutenant Armeni hadn't moved his vehicle to provide cover, he would have been killed, along with Callahan and Horrocks.

Looking at Lieutenant Armeni now, you would never guess that he almost didn't make it. He looked good, and he told us that everything was going well, and that he and his wife recently had another child, this time a baby girl.

As the old Army reenlistment slogan goes, Armeni decided to "Stay Army." He said that he and his wife had elected to stick it out, that he sincerely loved his job, and that being in the Army and waking up every morning and putting on an Army uniform was what he wanted, and he could never see himself doing anything other than that. "My dad was an armor officer, and I am now.... I love being in the combat arms, and I wouldn't want it any other way. I can't abide by... I just can't bring myself to quit. And it would be quitting, to some extent. I would be allowing the enemy to dictate to me what dreams I was following, and it's my dream to take command of a battalion-sized element. A cavalry squadron or an armored battalion. And why would I ever let somebody else dictate to me whether or not I can accomplish that? It seems foreign to me. And besides that, being blown up made me a better officer."

I was curious how he felt about going back to Iraq for a second time, and he said, "It's kind of weird, I think that we need to finish what we're doing over there, and that's not just the party line, I believe that. And I think that part of the price of that is people have to go back, and I had the option to medically retire, and had the option to leave the brigade, and I chose to stay in the Army and stay in the brigade, because if I have to go back to Iraq, I want to go back with the people that I know."

He went on to say that he wasn't looking forward to getting shot at and wasn't looking forward to being away from his family, either, but he was looking forward to going over there and doing good things and making sure that everybody comes back home alive.

"As a veteran going back, I feel like I'm helping to contribute to the skill base that's there. To enhance the chance that these guys are going to live through this deployment. I mean, I don't want to revisit the rollover again...." Lieutenant Armeni then faded off and said, "That was a bad night...."

A dead silence filled his office, and during that brief pause I faded out as well, and I suddenly remembered seeing Sergeant Bridges's daughter run up to him and give him a big hug one time when his wife stopped by to pick him up, and I remembered the night we left Fort Lewis seeing Specialist Wesley's whole family there to send him off, and how the song "We Die Young" by Alice in Chains seems a little eerie whenever I hear it now, since Facelift
was one of the albums that Specialist Blickenstaff loaned me right before we left.

I had all those thoughts and visions going through my head and Lieutenant Armeni looked at me and said, "You're thinking, Colby, what are you thinking about?"

I was thinking that that night was the turning point for me out there in Iraq. It changed the way I thought about and looked at a lot of things in life. The office went kind of quiet again.

I apologized for the awkwardness, and Lieutenant Armeni said not to think anything of it.

It was time to go. The whole time I was with him, I found myself addressing Lieutenant Armeni as sir even though there was no reason for me to do so anymore now that I am a civilian.

"Good to see you again, sir," I said to Lieutenant Armeni.

I love weddings almost as much as I love stop-loss, PT tests, parades, change-of-command ceremonies, beef-stew MREs, the front-lean-and-rest position, and so on, so I usually try to avoid them altogether. I even avoided my own wedding by having it at a drive-through chapel in Vegas. But I was not going to avoid Horrocks's wedding.

I've been to In-N-Out Burgers bigger than the Butte airport. The flight to Montana was late due to weather conditions, so I called Horrocks to tell him that it might be a while before I got there. He was extremely cool about it, and he told me that he would be waiting at the airport with his soon-to-be-father-in-law, Jim, and he requested that I do him a huge favor and watch my language.

They were patiently waiting for me in the airport lobby. Jim had on jeans and real-life cowboy boots. He also had a cool mustache going on. I shook his hand, said hello, and we made our way to his Dodge Ram pickup truck. I looked around at the other parked vehicles and saw that all the other trucks in the parking lot were supersized as well.

Jim is a fish-and-game warden, and he talked quite a bit about his job — stories of poachers, bears, and drunk deer killers gone wild — which I found interesting.

When it came time to drop Jim off at home, Horrocks and I piled the eighty dollars' worth of beer he had bought for the wedding into the back of the new pickup truck he had bought immediately upon our return from Iraq so that he could go out in the woods and fish and hunt.

The cabins where we were to stay were located down a narrow dirt road that had nothing for miles and miles in either direction. I cracked open a beer as Horrocks informed me that Montana had recently passed an open-container law. We decided that if we got caught, we would just pretend that nobody told us about it. He then told me that when he and his wife went down to the courthouse to get their marriage license, the clerk made them both pledge out loud something about "as far as we know, we are not related."

The night was bright from the moon, and Montana looked like a safari park with nature gone wild in all directions, elk, deer, buffalo, and bunny rabbits running around freely all over the place. At one point a nice-sized buck bounded out about fifteen meters in front of our truck, crossed the road, and jumped over a tall fence. The only thing I'm used to having bound out in front of me in Los Angeles are coked-up celebrities fiddling with their goddamn iPods.

We passed a couple lonely cabins, and I was reminded of a finance brief we sat through right before we deployed to Iraq. We had a person explain to us all our benefits and the VA home loan to us, and at the end of the brief there was a Q&A session. I was sitting in one of the front rows, and somebody sitting in a row far behind me stood up and asked whether or not he could use his loan to buy some land out in the woods instead of a house, because he wanted to build a cabin on the land himself. I turned around in my seat, thinking to myself, Who the fuck is this Davy Crockett who wants to build a cabin in the woods? Do people even still live in cabins? I looked back and there was Horrocks.

We arrived at the cabins with seventy dollars' worth of beer, and the next day I threw on some Banana Republic that my better half made me purchase a long time ago for an event that I had to look presentable for (and hadn't worn since) and walked over to the rough-hewn main cabin where the wedding was taking place. Horrocks was all dressed up in his Class-A uniform, with three full rows of ribbons and medals, blue cord and braided French fourragère, as well as a couple combat stripes on the sleeve. As much as I hated wearing the pickle-green Class-A uniform when I was in the Army, I kinda missed it now, standing there next to him in last season's argyle.

While waiting around for the wedding to start, the thirty or forty guests mingled, and eventually I got kinda peopled out, so I exited via the back door to sneak into the minus-20 weather for a smoke break. In the snow outside were several bottles of hard liquor that somebody had placed there to keep cold. As I was getting a smoke ready I overheard a couple people standing nearby laughing and talking about somebody singing "Born to Be Wild." I introduced myself as a friend of Horrocks's, and they told me about how the last time he was in Idaho, before he left for Iraq, they all took him out to the bars, and he karaoked "Born to Be Wild" and it was great, people loved him for it. I told them that I've seen him do the same thing in Washington — and loved him for it as well.

At the end of the wedding reception, Jim saw me standing around by myself and came up to me. We talked a little and he said, "I know you've heard this a lot already from many different people, but I just want to say that I'm glad that you made it back." I thanked him and told him that I was glad to be back as well. He went on to say that when he was in high school, there was this friend of his who graduated early because he was a really bright guy, and then he went off and joined the military, and a year later, in '66, he got killed in Vietnam. "I get sad whenever I think about that," Jim said, "because he had the best years of his life ahead of him, and he never got to experience them."

We stood there in silence and thought about that, and just then Sergeant Horrocks, looking like the happiest soldier, accompanied by his new wife, floated right by us, beaming to beat the band. The war would wait. On this day, in distant Montana, the war didn't matter, nothing else in the whole world mattered.

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